by Garry Disher
Regret
If you were old you were regretful, concealing it like a vice or wearing it like a scar. I think my old man secretly regrets coming here, Anna’s father said. Feels he acted too hastily, hadn’t thought enough about the isolation, something like that. It’s not as if he’s been able to forget what happened to my mother, after all. And if he’d stayed in the city he might have met someone else, who knows? It’s not something he’s ever talked about. It’s just a feeling I have about him, the far-off look he has sometimes. You know what I mean, love? Anna’s mother nodded. As for me, he went on, I think once you’ve made your bed you lie in it. I mean, I would like to have been a doctor—don’t laugh, I would—but the opportunities were never there, so what was the point in feeling sorry for myself because it didn’t happen? Look at Beulah, still eaten up with regret about that fellow her father wouldn’t let her marry. Anna listened. She went to Great Aunt Beulah. She leaned restlessly on the arm of the old woman’s chair, chattering, chattering: Our smallest lamb died. We’re going to Adelaide next week. Mum’s running me up a new dress. Auntie Beulah, did you ever see him again, the one you loved? In an instant, Beulah’s eyes spilled over, regret for the man she’d lost, regret for not having made a stand against her father. She murmured: If only I had my life over again. One day the children went out with Grandfather Ison. He juddered them along the sunken road in the Land Rover, occasionally shooting out his left arm to save them from hitting their heads, and as they climbed out of the deadliest bend and reached the high ground, where the stonewall fence marked the border between Isonville and Showalter Park, a sudden shadow drenched the Land Rover and a throttled-back aero engine deafened them. The children turned their heads and saw a silver fuselage side-slip over them, the braced undercarriage touching down in the dirt then coasting toward the windsock. Buyers, Grandfather Ison grunted, flying in from New South Wales to look at the rams. I regret, he told the children, the day my father split Isonville. Think what it could have been. Now all that’s left is the homestead and five thousand acres instead of twenty-five thousand. How your uncle Kitch is going to get on, I don’t know. He paused: Your mother was friendly with the Showalter boys, you know. No reflection on your father, of course, he added hastily. Long as she’s happy. Mum, were you engaged to the Showalter who died in the war or the other one? Heavens above, Anna, what gave you that idea? I married your father and I don’t regret it, not for a minute. Ah, Anna, back among us I see, Mr Wheelwright said, when Anna showed up a week late at the high school in the town. He gazed sourly at the desks and chalk dust and doltish minds: Let’s hope you don’t regret running back here from the city if it means being among this lot again. And so he marked her, set her apart. Think you’re better than us? they demanded. I came back here, she pointed out, but logic had nothing to do with the way they saw her. She regretted opening her mouth to Maxine about the Pill. It’s to control my periods, she shouted, but they were already labelling her and, in the end, she obliged them a little. When Lockie was killed, the words were there relentlessly in her head: He was the only one I loved and yet I said no to him. Too late, we hurt the ones we love, and we hurt ourselves. I shall never love again and I shall never forget, not until the day I die. The words grew melodic in her throat, rising and falling, until she began to sing them in a low, strained voice: For I have loved a boy but one, and he is lost to me/Forsaken love I will lament, lament what might have been. Now you’re being absurd, her mother said. Give it time, you’ll meet someone else, and Anna sang: Alas there’s none for me. It was a lament, she was inconsolable, and for six weeks of her life she floated in the inner dark. Chester Flood stroked her and said: I love your little belly. She watched his hand, thinking: He will give me back my luck. Then his head dipped and when he looked up he said: Salty fuck-taste, I love it. He wriggled his way back up to kiss her lips: Taste it? His eyes clouded: Remember old Wheelwright saying he’d make me regret the day I was born? Remember? Anna didn’t and was ashamed. Well, the bastard tried, all right, and he failed, Chester said. I survive, that’s what I do. These days Sam is apt to say, over and over: Of course now I regret not making more of an effort to stick it out with the old man. He has another regret: It’s tragic. There have been Showalters here from the year dot. They were good to me, giving me work. Now some flaming Saudi Arabian outfit looks like ripping the guts out of the place. Pity old Leonard Showalter wasn’t still alive—he wouldn’t have let it happen, that’s for sure. There are things worth hanging on to. There’s history here. That’s why this Committee’s a good thing, Anna—don’t knock it. The letter from the bank is burning a hole in the shallow cane basket on top of the refrigerator: We regret to advise you. Anna doesn’t think it’s regret. The letter has come from head office, not the local branch, not someone they know. Cruel, bloody cruel, Sam says. Then he cries, and Anna touches his neck to calm him, thinking: I can’t do more than this. I’ve done what I can and I hope he realises it. It’s up to him, now. In her solitary walks at the water’s edge an old regret will revisit her: I wish I’d known my grandmother, snatched away in the jaws of a shark. Such awful luck. Beautiful, young, gleeful, a risk-taker, someone I could have talked to. I never knew her, yet I miss her. Anna will go to the grave with a few regrets like this one. She will regret Michael, she will regret Lockie. They will not be cancerous regrets; they won’t take hold of her and creep through her bones over the years: If only I’d... If only I hadn’t... Regret, she’ll say, admonishing her granddaughter, is the cruellest emotion. It paralyses you. There is no point to it. The past is past. Life is a matter of tactics, not grand strategies. Anna will look back squarely on those she has loved and say: I cannot total it all, but I want you to understand this—what else could I have done? I was distracted, ignorant, too proud, too young, blameworthy, faintly absurd, given to anxious love and loving too well. Did you think that I had a key?
Love
Of all the varieties and acts of love on Isonville, there was this: the children’s mother clamping their heads between the palms of her hands and saying: I love you, my darlings. Do you believe me? When she leaned forward to touch noses with them, their small, ear-sized hands flew up and smacked damply, ecstatically against the sides of her head. They knew she loved them. She was always saying it. Anna loved her father. He was on the road by breakfast time, and coming back from some far-flung saleyard when it was time for bed, and because she so rarely saw him, each time was a new time. She loves her dad, people said. She loved certain dolls, an invisible friend, Kip with grass seeds in his thumping tail, and, for a short time at primary school, an orphan boy who had jet-black hair and the face of a ravaged angel. Her love for him was a pure, straightforward yearning, as much to look like him as to stand near him. Then the weight of district opinion wore her down: The Floods are poor, shifty, smelly. What she got out of it was an interest in romantic love: Tell me about the man you wanted to elope with. Did he love you? We loved each other through and through, Great Aunt Beulah replied. We were meant for each other but my cruel father drove him off. Aunt Beulah was creased and rouged and talcumed with age, yet she wept like a heartbroken slip of a girl. Anna imagined how her parents might have wooed. She stared her way into old photographs the size of playing cards and watched her parents kiss and canoodle. Her father wore his slouch hat and cigarette at cocky angles, a knowing grin bending the narrow planes of his handsome face. Beside him her mother tipped back her head to laugh, revealing her throat, her hands on her thighs, fighting down the gritty wind on a city street. Who took the photos? Dad’s army mate. Anna’s love for her friend Maxine lasted until they were both fifteen, when things went unaccountably wrong. Anna would spin around on the spot, saying: I want to be a wild, free, erotic perfect lover for my lover, failing to notice how earnest and chaste her friend had become. They grew further apart and Anna found herself branded slack, a moll. It was an undeserved reputation, but who would listen to her? So she grew into it, becoming flippant, arbitrary, careless, callous, qual
ities that intensified as the small-school whispers intensified. She was a fixed target in the moral landscape. Then she blinked, saw Lockie Kelly, and at once grew still and restful. She was a lover, now—all the other acts had been acts of grief, greed and hate. She made tender declarations to Lockie and the hateful whispers faded to nothing around her. But if she thought that love and a lover were solutions to life, she was wrong. Life had a way of insinuating itself. First, she left Lockie behind to study in the city, then she began to think about things outside of love. Ideas have consequences, some of them unpleasant. When it was clear that Lockie was going unquestioningly away to war, she took a lover to hurt him. And hurt herself, for the lover was egocentric and manipulative. She longed for him, was ecstatic when she made love to him, frustrated when she couldn’t be with him. Yet he was no one to write home about—dry skin, age-lines, a hint of desperation at the passing of the years. He would present himself to Anna as a man with an inner pain, and she would see herself as the solution to his pain, the place where he might come to rest. A day, a fuck later, he would be austere and withholding again. Anna’s head spun. She was poised to start her life after her childhood in the bush: surely he would start it for her? Everything in her that was lovely, unknowable, unclaimable and full of drama was waiting to be released. When eventually the ecstasy faded, the pain remained. Then one day she woke up: the boys from home were falling in a foreign war. A few years later, Anna met Sam Jaeger. He was three years older, someone she’d scarcely noticed at school. She scarcely noticed him now, so sunburnt was he, so anxious, so desirous of settling down. But: I’m tired, Anna told herself. He’s a decent man and I can rest in him. I won’t tell him that I don’t love him. Perhaps he senses that anyway. Perhaps love and companionship will grow. Sam seemed to adore her. He adored the kids in a thousand little ways. At bedtime, the CB radio crackled into life on the kitchen wall as he wished Michael, then Rebecca, goodnight, the tractor engine rumbling in the background, the tractor’s headlights crawling along the valley floor if the children cared to look for it from their bedroom window. Anna wondered if women sought a woman friend in the men they married. They were unlikely to find it. For example, if Anna wanted commiseration from Maxine, she got commiseration. From Sam she got advice and bolstering and a jollying-along that left her exhausted. She wondered if Michael and Rebecca saw love behind the inflexibility and harsh propriety of their grandparents in the house below. Sometimes they came back up the hill from the Jaegers to their mother, the sinner, full of love for the Saviour. Mum, have you found God? These days Anna tries to make allowances. She doubts that many relationships can withstand very much scrutiny. Old man Jaeger is dead, Mrs Jaeger is dying, and if they were not united by love then at least they were united by faith. Of her own situation, Anna has told herself that you may find ways to resolve the loss of a true love but not the loss of a child. Any love interrupted is devastating, but the lost love of a child is the only one that can’t be mended. It tends to blunt and mute you. That’s how she sees it now and she hopes that Rebecca understands. Anna will take out her manuscript from time to time and read what a mother in Berkshire had written to her only surviving son, leaseholder of pastoral land near Pandowie, in the colony of South Australia, in the year 1854:
It wouldst afford us great comfort if thou couldst find it in thy heart or thy day to write to us oftener than heretofore, my dear one, but, if thou art so occupied as to be unable to do so, might thou engage thy good wife to address a few lines in thy stead? All unite in love to thee, from thy affectionate Mother, Rebecca Ison.
Anna will close her eyes and feel affection for the intensity of every one of her younger selves, all that pain and love.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Although this is a work of fiction, the setting is an actual region of South Australia called variously the mid-north or the northern highlands, and I found the following sources invaluable for suggesting material that I have reworked for the story:
ADELAIDE OBSERVER, 29 November 1851; Ian Auhl, Thomas Picket, National Trust pamphlet, n.d., n.p.; Frankie Hawker and Rob Linn, Bungaree: Land, Stock and People, Turn-bull Fox Phillips, Adelaide, 1992; Angus McInnes, Reminiscences of the Ulooloo Gold Diggings, Angus McInnes, Burra, 1995; Roma Mattey, Deceptive Lands: A history of Terowie and surrounding hundreds in the mid-north of South Australia, Investigator Press, Leabrook, 1971; Nancy Robinson (ed.), Stagg of Tarcowie: the diaries of a colonial teenager, Lynton Publications, Adelaide, 1973; SOUTH AUSTRALIAN REGISTER, 1842 (various editions).
1
THIS CLOSE TO Christmas, the mid-north sun had some heft to it, house bricks, roofing iron, asphalt and the red-dirt plains giving back all the heat of all the days. And this Thursday morning a grass fire to top it off.
Hirsch toed a thick worm of softened tar at the edge of the Barrier Highway, watching the mop-up. Country Fire Service trucks from Tiverton, Redruth and Mount Bryan in attendance. One of them at the seat of the fire behind an old farmhouse set back from the road, the second chasing spot fires, and the Tiverton unit patrolling the fence line. Not a blazing fire—a slow creep through sparse wheat stubble. And not a big one—only a corner of the farmhouse hedge and the road paddock. No wind today. Cloudless, as still as a painting.
A suspicious fire, though.
‘Suspicious in what way?’ Hirsch asked.
He’d parked his South Australia Police 4WD nose-up to the tailgate of Bob Muir’s ute, nudging the words Tiverton Electrics. If Hirsch had a friend, a male friend, in the district, it was Muir. A mild man, unhurried, but capable of a hard, exacting competency whenever he used his hands or his brain. He was what passed for the local fire chief.
‘Not a firebug, if that’s what you’re thinking,’ Muir said. ‘I’ll show you once they’ve given the okay.’
All Hirsch could see right now was a corrugated-iron roof with flakes of farmhouse-red paint still clinging, and a towering palm tree.
The Tiverton unit drew near, Kev Henry the publican at the wheel. Two men on the back, hosing fence posts: Wayne Flann and some guy Hirsch didn’t recognise. A shearer? Windfarm worker? Didn’t matter. Flann mattered, at least to some extent. He was mid-twenties, with sleepy eyes, loose limbs, almost good-looking. Always privately amused, as if he knew something the rest of the world didn’t. Getting a kick out of this fire. Flicked his wrist when he spotted Hirsch, landing a loop of water on his uniform shoes.
‘Knock it off, Wayne,’ Muir said.
The truck trundled on and then a radio crackled. Bob Muir listened, said, ‘Good oh,’ and jerked his head. ‘This way, Constable Hirschhausen.’
A long, rutted driveway took them down to a gap in the hedge and the house and sheds on the other side. The house had been unoccupied for years, the stone walls ceding to the dirt, the rocks and the dying grass. Ants teemed where once had been lawns and flowerbeds. A wheelless pram beside a crooked garden tap; a ladder busted down to three or four rungs leaning against the tank stand. Nothing seemed whole. Cracked windowpanes, grass in the rusted and drooping gutters. Only the palm tree showed any splendour, and its base was littered with dead fronds.
Hirsch parked behind Muir in the side yard and got out. Here the smoke was more acrid—burnt vegetation with an overlay of scorched rubber? The sunlight was queer, too, winking hazily where it came through the ragged fringe of palm fronds, casting blurred shadows on the dirt.
Looking up, Hirsch said, ‘These old country places with their palm trees.’
Muir grunted. ‘Over this way.’
He took Hirsch along the flank of the house and around the tank stand to the backyard. The cypress hedge sheltered the house and garden on three sides, Hirsch realised. To his eye, the fire had started in one corner, charring the patchy grass before scorching its way through the hedge, leaving a spidery tangle of blackened, leafless twigs in its hunt for better fuel on the other side—the wheat stubble.
‘What do you make of that?’ Muir said, pointing at the blackened dirt.
&nbs
p; Hirsch looked down. Ash on his toecaps now, not only dust. He felt sweaty, greasy, a sensation of grit in his teeth. And still early in the day. ‘Kids playing with matches?’
Muir might have been disappointed in him. ‘Mate, the wire.’
Coiled in the ash at the base of the hedge was a length of insulated cable. Now Hirsch understood the taste of the smoke: molten plastic. But mostly his gaze was caught by a stripe of copper glowing bright.
‘Ah.’
‘Exactly,’ Muir said, spreading his arms. ‘I mean, why go to the bother of slicing off insulation with a knife when you can burn it off? Lovely hot summer’s day, dead grass all around…’
Hirsch grinned. ‘Maybe they felt better-hidden in here.’
Muir pointed to the dead ground between the house and the sheds. ‘They would’ve been just as invisible from the road over there in the dirt.’
